Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As web services and service providers proliferate, many web applications can be assembled rapidly from the many commercial services available. For example, an e-commerce web application may be assembled from multiple service providers each providing particular functionality (e.g., authentication, user interfaces, social networking, payment processing, etc.) or from a single service provider who in turn aggregates services from other service providers.
One of the outcomes from this distributed service architecture may be that many users are unaware of which actual hardware they are dependent on. Thus, this distributed structure may have many points of failure, and a web application relying on multiple services may fail if even one associated datacenter goes down. For example, an outage at a datacenter hosting one application or module may take down many applications that are not even aware that they depend on the particular application/module because the relationship is transparent to those applications. In some scenarios, sub-services with over a billion requests per month may exist on single datacenters for better margins.